David Hibbett PhD

David Hibbett is Professor of Biology at Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts, U.S.A. He received his PhD from Duke University and held postdoctoral appointments at the Tottori Mycological Institute (Japan) and at Harvard University. He is a former President of the Mycological Society of America. Professor Hibbett has diverse research interests, including fungal systematics and evolution, particularly Agaricomycotina (mushroom-forming fungi), comparative genomics and decay mechanisms, developmental biology, and paleomycology.

A common thread uniting his work is the application of a phylogenetic perspective gained through analysis of molecular characters. He was a Principal Investigator in the Assembling the Fungal Tree of Life (AFTOL) project, which resulted in a unified phylogenetic classification for all fungi, and has advocated for formal description of fungal species based solely on environmental nucleic acid sequences.